Best website builder for a self-employed carpenter: what the nine routes actually cost
The cheapest website builder advertised to UK carpenters this week costs £2.99 a month. To get £2.99 a month you hand over £143.52 today, in one payment, for the next forty eight months. When that runs out it renews at £10.99. Three numbers, one plan, and only the smallest of them appears in the advertising.
I went through the live checkout pages on the twentieth of August 2026 rather than repeating what the comparison sites say, because the comparison sites quote the headline and the headline is the one figure nobody pays. Every builder below does some version of the same thing. Two of them quote excluding VAT.
So this is what the nine realistic routes cost a self-employed carpenter in Britain, what you actually hand over in year one and across three years, and the one feature that matters more in this trade than in any other: what the thing does to your photographs.
For a UK carpenter building it themselves, Squarespace Core is the sensible pick: £16 a month billed yearly, £21 rolling, a gallery that copes with forty photographs, and a price that does not jump. Hostinger and IONOS advertise less but both figures are introductory, and IONOS quotes excluding VAT.
The advertised price is almost never the price
Every major website builder selling into the UK advertises a monthly figure that is either an introductory rate, a long prepayment divided by its own term, or quoted without VAT, and often two of the three at once.
Here is the actual arithmetic on the cheapest advertised builder, taken off its own checkout page. Nothing here is my estimate. It is all printed on the plan card, in smaller type than the £2.99.
Hostinger Premium, the real four year receipt
| Advertised price | £2.99 / mo |
| Paid on day one, for 48 months | £143.52 |
| Their stated regular price for the same term | £575.52 |
| Renewal rate when the 48 months end | £10.99 / mo |
| Year five, at the renewal rate | £131.88 |
| What "£2.99 a month" means in practice | £143.52 up front |
Figures read from the Hostinger UK website builder pricing page on 20 August 2026. The 48 month term, the regular price and the renewal rate are all quoted by Hostinger on the plan card itself.
There is nothing dishonest in that. It is all disclosed. But a carpenter comparing £2.99 against a monthly plan somewhere else is comparing a four year prepayment against a rolling arrangement, and those are not the same product. The number to compare is what leaves your account in year one and what leaves it in year four.
Nine routes, priced from the checkout page
Once the introductory rates expire, the realistic running cost of a self-managed carpentry website in the UK settles between roughly £120 and £250 a year, which is a much narrower spread than the advertising suggests.
| Route | Advertised | What you hand over | After the intro |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hostinger Premium | £2.99 / mo | £143.52 up front, 48 months | £10.99 / mo |
| IONOS MyWebsite Plus | £1 / mo | £12 for year one, ex VAT | £16 / mo ex VAT, so £19.20 |
| IONOS MyWebsite Starter | £6 / mo | £36 for six months, ex VAT | £10 / mo ex VAT, so £12 |
| Squarespace Basic | £10 / mo | £120 for the year, up front | Same, or £15 rolling |
| Squarespace Core | £16 / mo | £192 for the year, up front | Same, or £21 rolling |
| WordPress.com Personal | Intro rate | Billed 12 months at a time | Three prices on one card |
| Wix Light and Core | Varies by location | A year in full, per their footnote | Not published in GBP |
| Google Sites | Free | Nothing | Free, no custom domain |
| Done for you (mine) | £50 / 4 weeks | Nothing on day one | Same, and yours at 12 months |
Two entries need explaining rather than defending. Wix is on the list because plenty of British carpenters use it, but its pricing page states that displayed prices are USD for reference only, that currency varies by location, and that the figures shown are for yearly subscriptions paid in full. I am not going to convert a dollar figure and present it as fact. Check it at your own checkout. WordPress.com showed me a list price, a promotional price and an auto renewal price on the same plan card, which is the trap in this article rendered as a single screenshot.
And my own row is the expensive one on pure cash, which I would rather say plainly than bury. £50 every four weeks is thirteen payments a year, so £650, against roughly £192 for Squarespace Core. The gap buys the build, the hosting, the domain, the edits and somebody else doing all of it. If you enjoy the work, the builders win on money. That is the whole argument and I am not going to dress it up.
Three traps, and how to check for each before you pay
The introductory rate, the prepayment term and the VAT exclusion account for nearly every gap between what a carpenter expects to pay and what appears on the bank statement a year later.
None of this makes any of them a bad product. It makes the advertised league table useless, which is why a carpenter who picks on the headline figure so often ends up feeling stung in month thirteen. The same pattern runs through the free tiers, which I went through separately in what a free website builder really gives a tradesman.
The bit that actually decides it for a carpenter: the gallery
Carpentry has no register a homeowner recognises, so unlike a Gas Safe plumber or an NICEIC electrician your entire credibility arrives through photographs, which makes image handling the deciding feature rather than a nice extra.
Every paid builder here will accept forty photographs. The difference is what happens to them on the way in. Most compress uploads aggressively by default, and compression is invisible on the sort of photo most trades put up and extremely visible on a grain match, a hand cut dovetail or a scribe against a wall that was never straight. The detail shot is the one that wins a bespoke commission, and it is exactly the one compression ruins.
What to test before you commit
Upload one close detail shot on the free trial, open it on a phone on mobile data, and look at the end grain. If it has gone mushy, that builder is going to soften every piece of work you ever put on it. Do this before you have built thirty pages, not after.
Ordering matters as much as quality
A gallery grouped by job type sells. A gallery ordered by upload date does not, because a homeowner looking for fitted wardrobes has to scroll past a loft hatch and two door hangings to find one. Squarespace and Wix both group properly without an add on. The cheaper builders tend to give you one grid and leave you to it, which is the point at which people give up and dump everything in date order.
Which route suits which carpenter
The right answer depends almost entirely on where your last twenty jobs came from, because a site backing up subcontract work and a site winning bespoke commissions from homeowners are different products with different budgets.
If your work arrives from two or three regular builders, the site is confirmation. Google Sites, free, one page, phone number at the top, done in an evening. Spending £192 a year on Squarespace to confirm something a free page confirms just as well is money you could put into a better mitre saw.
If you want bespoke commissions from homeowners across your part of England, the site is comparison, and you are being weighed against two other joiners on finish alone. That justifies Squarespace Core, or having it built. In my audit notes on carpenters and joiners, the single most common failing was not an ugly design. It was no project photos at all, on a site selling a visual craft. No builder on this list fixes that, and it is worth reading the order the build actually has to happen in before you pay any of them a penny, because the photographs come first.
If you are tempted by the AI builders
Every platform here now leads with an AI generator, and they are genuinely good at removing the blank page. They are not good at knowing your towns, your lead time or which of your jobs proves you can handle a £12,000 kitchen rather than a £200 repair. I went into where that line falls in the verdict on AI website builders for trades.
Bottom line: pick Squarespace Core if you are building it yourself and you care about the gallery, Google Sites if the site only has to prove you exist, and ignore every advertised figure below about £10 a month until you have found the renewal rate underneath it. The builders are not the problem. The pricing pages are.